Nine PM on a Tuesday. I'm closing my IDE for the day—day job done—and cracking open a Notion database I built specifically for this experiment. Every click, every signup, every dollar is logged. Three columns for content, four for revenue, one for hours invested. Because if I'm going to run a side hustle, I'm going to know exactly what it pays me per hour. That's just who I am as a dev. I track what I measure.
This is the story of my first 90 days as an AI API affiliate. Not a polished case study. A real, slightly messy, spreadsheet-confession kind of post. I'll show you the actual numbers, the actual time I burned, and the moment I realised the math might actually work.
Why a Developer Picked Affiliate Marketing (and the Filter That Saved Me)
Quick background. I've been shipping side projects for years. Most of them make about as much as a vending machine in a low-traffic hallway—which is to say, almost nothing. I've got a full-time dev job that pays the bills, but I've always wanted at least one income stream that doesn't require trading hours for dollars in a 1:1 ratio.
Affiliate marketing kept surfacing in my research. The pitch is simple: recommend a product, get paid when someone buys. The catch is that most programs are terrible. One-time payouts. Low commission rates. Products I wouldn't personally use. So I built a filter. The only programs I would consider had to clear three bars:
- A product I would actually recommend to another developer
- A recurring commission structure (so the income compounds instead of vanishing)
- At least 10% on the initial sale I spent a week researching AI API affiliate programs specifically. The reasoning: I've been building with these tools for over
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